General Purpose Dictionaries

• Provide comprehensive linguistic information about words in a single language
  • Spelling, pronunciation, and grammatical classification
  • Multiple meanings and contextual usage examples
  • Etymology and historical development notes
• Typically monolingual and organised alphabetically for easy reference
• Valuable for morphological research because they:
  • Document detailed word origins and development
  • Show common usage patterns and variations
  • Provide historical context for word formation

Bilingual and Multilingual Dictionaries

• Facilitate translation between two or more languages
• Key features and functions:
  • Support language learning and translation work
  • Help decode meanings across different languages
  • Illustrate cultural and linguistic nuances
• Important for morphological research by:
  • Enabling cross-linguistic word formation studies
  • Revealing patterns in comparative linguistics
  • Showing how concepts transfer between languages

Specialized Dictionaries

• Focus on specific aspects of language or technical fields:
  • Etymology and word origins
  • Precise pronunciation guides
  • Technical and discipline-specific terminology
  • Slang and colloquial expressions
• Particularly valuable for:
  • Detailed academic research in specific fields
  • Understanding technical vocabulary development
  • Tracing specialised word formation patterns

Other Major Dictionaries

Merriam-Webster Dictionary (https://www.merriam-webster.com/)

• American English focus
• Strong etymology coverage
• Regular updates for contemporary usage
• Valuable for understanding American English word formation

Collins English Dictionary (https://www.collinsdictionary.com/)

• Comprehensive vocabulary coverage
• Strong British English focus
• Detailed word formation information
• Includes frequency information and usage trends

Cambridge English Dictionary (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/)

• Clear definitions and examples
• Strong learner focus
• British English emphasis
• Excellent grammatical information and usage notes

Online Etymology Dictionary (https://www.etymonline.com/)

• Detailed word history tracking
• Etymology focus
• Historical development emphasis
• Traces morphological changes over time

Historical linguistic analysis:

• Tracking morphological changes through time
  • e.g. comparing Old English strong verbs to Modern English irregular forms
• Understanding semantic development
  • e.g. charting the shift of awful from ‘full of awe’ to ‘terrible’
• Documenting word formation patterns
  • e.g. analyzing the emergence of the prefix cyber- in late 20th century

Comparative linguistics:

• Cross-linguistic word formation studies
  • e.g. comparing German and English compound nouns (e.g. de. Zahnarzt vs en. tooth doctor)
• Analysis of borrowing patterns
  • e.g. tracing French loanwords (e.g. cuisine, ballet) into English after the Norman Conquest
• Understanding morphological universals
  • e.g. investigating prefixation productivity across unrelated languages (e.g. ge- in German, en- in English)

Contemporary language research:

• Neologism studies and word creation
  • e.g. investigating the rise of selfie and meme via social media corpora
• Sociolinguistic variation
  • e.g. examining morphological variation in teenage text messaging (e.g. abbreviations like u for you)
• Internet-influenced language change
  • e.g. analyzing adoption of acronyms (e.g. lol, brb) in spoken and written registers

Methodological applications:

• Diachronic studies of word formation
• Quantitative analysis of lexical change over time
• Corpus-based validation of dictionary entries
• Tracking the adoption of loanwords and neologisms
• Identifying gaps or biases in dictionary coverage
• Supporting computational linguistics and NLP tasks (e.g. lemmatisation, part-of-speech tagging)
• Informing the design of new dictionaries and lexical resources

Using the OED’s Advanced Search:

• find all terms that are marked as obsolete
• sort them by Date (newest first)
• export the results as a CSV file

Using Microsoft Excel:

1. open the CSV file
2. save the file as an Excel file (.xlsx extension)
3. convert the exported rows/columns to a Table
4. create Pivot Tables to analyse the data
5. create Pivot Charts to visualise the data

Model Excel file: https://1drv.ms/x/c/9a2ec97d593520f9/EaLL88w43gZCrHEXDYO5Qa0BRPZiuRcROamaxi4AJhFTsg

Analysis objectives:

1. How many terms are marked as obsolete across the whole OED?
2. What are the most common word classes of obsolete terms?
3. What are the most common word-formation processes?
4. What are the most common subjects?